My doctor showed me an astonishing letter, one of many she's received from insurance companies, complaining that she is not prescribing enough prescription drugs to her patients!
I was shocked. Why would an insurance company have the right to tell my doctor what drugs she should be prescribing?
I mean, I know insurance companies tell us what tests we can and can't have and how long we can stay in the hospital and what drugs they will cover.
But why would they be pushing a doctor to prescribe more drugs?
The drugs were named by brand name, too. It wasn't just cholesterol-lowering drugs. It was Zocor, or something like that. I don't remember the actual names. I know one group was cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Is this some new unholy alliance between big insurance and big pharmacy? Has anyone ever heard of anything like this before?
Aren't the cholesterol-lowering drugs ones that have been shown to have some nasty side-effects lately?
My doctor is board certified in internal medicine. She hates insurance companies and most doctors for how they practice. She isn't a preferred provider for any insurance company, so they don't get as much leverage in telling her what to do. You pay her fee and then if you can get money from the insurance company, you do. She doesn't mess with them, and I'm lucky to be able to pay to get that kind of care.
I also get an amazing 30 full minutes of her time for $75, because she believes you can't really treat patients well if you see them for 10 minutes at a time, that you have to listen to them to really undrestand what's going on with them.
She's very picky about the drugs she prescribes and highly skeptical about drugs in general.
She's also very uneasy about health care reform, sure the insurance companies will change drastically what they cover, for the same or more money in premiums, and Americans will be stuck without the care they need.
I was just wondering if anyone's heard of other doctors being told to prescribe more drugs? She said she's getting more and more of those letters. They review her cases to see diagnoses and what treatment she prescribed and decide they know better than she does what her patients need.
She fears doctors will soon have even less power than they do now in treatment of their own patients.